Development Entrepreneurs

Guy Fawkes has been called “the last man to enter Parliament with honest intentions” - which was to blow it up.  410 years ago to this day he was caught with gunpowder in the basement of the House of Lords. Under questioning and torture he confessed to being part of “the Gunpowder Plot”, an attempt to kill King James I and replace him with a Catholic monarch (Fawkes was Catholic).  Fawkes was executed soon after, but Parliament was not done with him. They passed an Act to encourage the King's subjects to celebrate his King’s deliverance by lighting bonfires every Fifth of November.   Thus "Guy Fawkes' Night", an annual  celebration with fireworks and burning of his effigy. The Gunpowder Plot is just one of countless attempts to achieve change through violence. Unlike Fawkes' failed plot, many others plans succeeded - suicide bombings, 9/11, state-sponsored regime change. Some achieved their objectives, some failed. Running parallel in history wit...

No survey, no title. This has been the mantra of professionals involved in the issuance of titles. Whether you go through the courts or you go through Administrative processes, you will need to have your land surveyed before you can get your title. It’s a good thing that Cadastral Surveys have been completed throughout the Philippines, as DENR tells us. But having your land covered by a Cadastral Survey does not automatically mean you don’t need a subdivision survey anymore, as your plot may be part of a larger piece of land that appears on the cadastral survey.  Subdivision surveys for individual lots cost money. You will need a licensed Geodetic Engineer to do it. He does not work alone, but with a team. And they need equipment, transportation, meals. You can pay for it all, packaged in a contact. The cost is usually set for each locality by an association of surveyors, which establishes a tariff.  Having adjacent lots surveyed at one time could be cheape...

R ecently I attended a conference on “Doing Things Differently”, hosted by the Asian Development Bank in the Philippines and supported by GIZ. It was superbly organized and managed by Futuregov, a swell bunch of folks who also introduced the “Unconference”. This is where they allow conference participants to propose their own topics for discussion. Other participants can “vote with their feet” - join any Unconference session that interests them. As participant, you can move freely between any of the five or six simultaneous Unconference sessions. I proposed a session around the question  - when you’re project approach does not seem to be working and you want to change strategies, what are the factors that you should consider before you pivot? The beauty with these Unconferences, I learned, is that the “host” does not have to do all the talking. Other participants chimed in with their ideas, even trafficked the discussion. Here are some of the ideas that I noted dow...

R ecently there’s been a fair amount of debate in two projects that I’ve had the good fortune to work with. The debate is about what exactly is needed to scale up reforms.  Say you have tested a development reform theory in a pilot site, and the results are great. Now you (and your donor) want to implement the reform beyond the pilot site - ideally, nationwide! What will it take to do that? Some colleagues say the only thing needed to scale up a successful reform is a national policy. Others think policies are necessary to establish the legal basis for the reform nationwide, but is not enough to actually make nationwide implementation happen. That, they say, will require additional inputs from development workers. While I was cleaning out old files from my magic trunk I came across materials from reform projects I had worked on over the last two decades or so.  As I read through them I found that our work always involved any combination of the following: 1) introduction of ...

A reformer struggles against the status quo. The status quo involves a complicated network of policies, Government agencies, social actors, dominant players, regulators, media, informal rules, formal and informal alliances of forces that benefit from the way things are - and what to keep things that way. Sometimes its easy to see how these networks protect themselves - like when they publish a position paper in national dailies.  Sometimes they advance their interests in subtle but still public ways - for example, by sponsoring a politician’s “public service message”. Then there are times when act in ways that are not noticed by the general public, but obvious to experienced political observers. Reformists train themselves to see these subtle, informal methods. Most of us will not make much of these events, but some reformists would view these as attempts of entrenched networks to protect themselves: One fine day certain columnists, radio commentators and media personal...

I n 2010 it was estimated that out of 24 million parcels of land in the Philippines that could be titled, 50% or 12 million remained un-titled. Of these, 4 million are agricultural lands while 8 million are residential lands - the kind of lands that are in the center of each Municipality or City, which also tend to be the more expensive lands.   It was also estimated that the total number of new titles being issued each year was around 5,000.  There are many reasons for this.  Titling requires survey, and by then a huge number of LGUs had not been surveyed yet - by some estimates, 70%.  There were two ways to get titles for residential land - you can buy the land from government (Miscellaneous Sales Application), or you can file a legal claim for the title (judicial process). Both required the kind of expenses that are beyond most of the capability of public land occupants. 12 million divided by 5,000 - it would take us 1,600 years to completely titl...